El Senor Presidente by Miguel Angel Asturias

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Synopsis

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

Novelist, playwright, poet, translator, and diplomat, Miguel Asturias received the Nobel Prize for what was considered highly colored writing rooted in national individuality and Indian tradition. His first novel, El Senor Presidente, a fictional account of the period of violence and human degradation under the Guatemalan dictator Estrada Cabrera, was completed in 1932 but not published until 1946 for political reasons. It was pioneering in its use of surrealistic structures and Indian myth as integrated parts of the novel's structure. Mulata (1963) uses a Guatemalan version of the legend of Faust as a point of departure for Asturias's inventive use of Indian myth. In 1966, Asturias received the Lenin Peace Prize for writings that expose American intervention against the Guatemalan people. Following the 1954 uprising, Asturias was deprived of his citizenship by the new government and lived in exile for eight years. After the election of President Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro in 1967, he was restored to his country's diplomatic services as ambassador to Paris and continued to publish.